November 6, 2011
Two recent stories of love and death feel connected. This is absurd considering that 1,500 years and 5,000 miles separate them. But why let facts get in the way of a feeling, a yearning? Last month an Iowa couple married for 72 years died an hour apart while holding hands. The wife died first but the hospital heart-rate monitor kept showing she had a pulse. The equipment was detecting her husband’s heart through their clasped hands. Then came news last week of an archeological find in Italy: two skeletons buried in the 5th or 6th centuries while holding hands. How can there be a connection beyond hands held and the bond of enduring love they signify?
The stories reminded me of a column, “Einstein’s God” that suggests the possibility of something I want to believe: the two couples are one in the same. When Albert Einstein learned of the death of a physicist friend, he wrote to the friend’s family:
He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.â€
I spent a long time on the print side of newspapers and a good number of years starting and nurturing their online offspring. These days I’m online much of each day and night but still have this thing for the printed page.
It began, like many things, with a childhood ritual: plodding barefoot to the end of our driveway in Maitland, Florida and fetching the morning paper. As a kid I also fell in love with magazines, especially Life, which opened the world to me in pictures. Read More
I’m busy contemplating how to use the extra one second bestowed upon us at the moment 2008 ends.
The addition of a so-called leap second last happened in 2005, not that anyone noticed. But reading about this latest adjustment, I imagine life shifting into slow motion at 23:59:59. What dramas or epiphanies will burst forth in that precious extra second? Will someone fall in love in 2008 instead of 2009. Will a baby be born in December rather than January? The list of possibilities is, well, endless. Read More
News flash: A Civil War cannonball kills a relic collector 140 years after it was fired near Richmond, Virginia.
Analysis: Wars don’t end when peace is declared; the weapons fight on.
Would the soldier who lit the cannon’s fuse done so had he recognized the potential consequences rippling out over Time . . . consequences (collector’s son fatherless, wife widowed) that have triggered yet more ripples with effects unknown?
Votes cast in elections create ripples, too.
